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Angel’s Ridge, Washington Territory, 1854. It’s dusty, there’s a saloon bar, there’s horses, an ineffable sense of – I don’t know, let’s call it manifest destiny – about the place, and the only colour settlers have brought with them is sepia. But wait! What’s this? The owner of the local silver mine riding into town? And it’s a woman! In a western?
Yessir, it is. Not only that but she is played by Gillian Anderson (in full ice mode, despite the dust) and is clearly trouble. Not only that, but there is a second woman about to go toe-to-toe with her and do battle for the town’s soul over the eight episodes that comprise The Abandons, the latest venture from Sons of Anarchy’s Kurt Sutter. Its joint lead is Lena Headey as Fiona Nolan, a devout Irish Catholic woman who has gathered a misfit ragtag bunch of motley orphan crew outcasts about her and lives with this patchwork family in Jasper Hollow. Jasper Hollow, alas, is full of silver that Constance Van Ness (the local mine owner, played by Anderson) wishes to bring under her control to placate one of her investors.
The Nolan homestead and cattle ranch, along with the settlements belonging to the three other hard-working, honest families in the Hollow, have been experiencing a run of bad luck ever since the Van Ness eye turned towards their land. After Constance’s latest visit to town, a group of masked men drive Fiona’s steers to the edge of a cliff and only the plucky orphans’ bravery prevents a bovine massacre.
“Her tyranny’s getting worse!” says orphan Elias (Nick Robinson), because there are moments in the script where things are less A Fistful of Dollars than The Gilded Age Goes Back 50 Years and Takes a Hike West. But he’s right, and the sheriff, the dirty dog, won’t help. Thus begins the conflict between the powerful and the powerless, between right and might, between people bound by blood and people bound to each other by choice. Also, faith and godlessness, fidelity and treachery, legal justice and moral justice. It’s a very binary era.
But westerns cannot live by struggles fuelled by abstract notions alone. We have to be more emotionally invested than that, so the dissolute but beloved son Willem Van Ness (Toby Hemingway) is pitchforked to death by Elias’s sister Dahlia (Diana Silvers) after he attempts to rape her. The Nolan clan hide the body but Constance sniffs out guilt like a mongoose in a bustle and redoubles her efforts to bring them down. Fiona redoubles hers to unite the four families of Jasper Hollow against the mongoose tyranny. In the end, a dead dog sways the vote and the fight is truly on.
Added to the mix is outlaw Roache (Michiel Huisman), who bonds with Constance’s daughter over a mutual love of Schubert, and we all know where that can lead. She and Elias have been making goo-goo eyes at each other, too, which is no mean feat in such a dusty environment. Timothy V Murphy joins as Father Duffy, Fiona’s childhood friend and lifelong support. Is this a genre in which it is wise to trust a priest? Is any? We shall see.
Like most westerns, The Abandons drives you to distraction because it takes itself so very, very seriously. Perhaps when the US gets a bit older it will be able to laugh at itself a bit more, or at least let a bit more light and shade into the retellings of its origin story. But at the moment, the result is too often too heavy to take proper flight.
Does the twist of having the warring protagonists be matriarchs instead of patriarchs help? A little. But the novelty wears off faster than it might when their concerns remain the same as ever: protecting the family legacy (whether it’s a found family or otherwise) and rallying hardscrabble folks against the privileged, apparently untouchable few.
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Many of The Abandons’ concerns were better and more interestingly examined in 2022’s The English (a revisionist western further revised by Hugo Blick and starring Emily Blunt and Chaske Spencer as two rootless beings finding out what freedom means). But it remains a thoughtful, essentially sound production – and the script improves in quality if not depth. Overall, The Abandons works, because myths by definition always work. You want to see the Nolans win, you want corruption to be vanquished, you want moral order to be restored. In the defiantly unmythic real world, we need our fictions.
